The Spider Bite

Megan was staring out the window in the backseat of her mom’s minivan with a blank expression painted across her silent face. She shivered at the thought of spending her whole summer vacation at her grandma’s house. But this wasn’t any typical grandma—Megan was convinced that Grandma Betty was a witch who practiced witchcraft daily. 

“Mom, I hate to say this, but why can’t we spend the summer at my cousin’s house instead?”

Megan’s mom sighed as she rubbed her forehead between her fingers, 

“Honey, we’ve had this conversation already. Your grandma is getting older, so we need to spend as much time with her as possible.” 

Megan nodded her head as she stared off into space. 

A few hours later, the minivan pulled into the driveway of a massive mansion obscured in the thicket with dusty cobwebs and doors that looked like they would creak. The garden surrounding the building was more cluttered than ever since nobody usually cleaned the place. Grandma Betty was peacefully resting in her antique rocking chair with her eyes closed on the front porch like always. Her old, wrinkled face immediately lit up in delight as Megan and her mom started to unpack their luggage from the minivan. 

There was something off about the afternoon atmosphere though, Megan soon realized that the woods surrounding the mansion weren’t fenced off like before. 

“Oh,” she thought, “Maybe Grandma Betty simply decided that it would be better to enjoy nature, which isn’t a big deal.”

Unfortunately, she was very wrong. 

After a few days, Megan slowly started to admit that visiting Grandma Betty wasn’t such an awful decision after all. The mansion rooms were filled with books from many generations back, some as far back as the Victorian Era! Megan’s head felt like it would burst from imagination as she stayed up all night reading detailed world history books about Queen Victoria and the world’s first Industrial Revolution. The book covers were old and tattered, but Megan did not mind since she was so bored from sitting around all day. 

She was so mesmerized by the ancient stories that Megan didn’t seem to notice a spider crawling up her body, heading straight towards her face. The spider was quite expansive with exceedingly intricate legs that extended down its fuzzy body. 

Suddenly, the spider made a loud chattering noise as it sank its treacherous fangs into Megan’s left cheek. Megan shrieked with a sound of dismay as blood started to ooze down her face in large streaks of red. She could feel herself slowly falling unconscious as the sound of her mother’s footsteps rang in her eardrums. 

“Oh my gosh! What happened to you, my dear?”

The blurry image of her mother’s concerned face was nothing more than a fuzzy dot in her dimming vision. Megan could still slightly make out the eerie sound of Grandma Betty’s shaky voice saying, 

“There is nothing to worry about, Megan. That was just my sweet pet Barbara from the woods behind the mansion.”